The phonology of Nigerian English – national and transnational patterns of variation
Project lead and contact person: Prof. Dr. Ulrike Gut
Faculty and Department: Faculty 09 Philology – English Department
Project duration and funding agency: May 2023 to April 2026 – DFG
Research question:
The project explores the phonology of Nigerian English, in particular the issues of its national variation (regional and sociolinguistic) and possible transnational trends in comparison with Ghanaian and Cameroonian English.
Project abstract:
For the spoken portion of the ICE-Nigeria corpus, automatic phonemic transcriptions using the FAVE aligner are generated and manually corrected. Ghanaian and Cameroonian English data are orthographically transcribed using automatic speech recognition and then phonemically annotated with FAVE and manually corrected using Praat. Acoustic measurements of vowel properties (formants, duration, vowel-inherent spectral change) and consonantal processes (cluster reduction, TH-stopping) will be performed to explore regional and sociolinguistic variation within Nigerian English, as well as similarities and differences with other West African varieties of English in Ghana and Cameroon.
Digital methods to be used:
- FAVE aligner for forced alignment, automatic phonemic transcription generation
- Automatic speech recognition tools
- FAVE-extract for vowel analysis
- Praat for phonemic annotation correction
- ELAN for corpus annotations
Role of SCDH in this project:
Consulting
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